Remember my article on Set Operations in the Unix Shell? I implemented 14 various set operations by using common Unix utilities such as diff, comm, head, tail, grep, wc and others. I decided to create a simpler version of that post that just lists the operations. I also created a .txt cheat-sheet version of it and to make things more interesting I added an Awk implementation of each set op. If you want a detailed explanations of each operation, go to the original article.

Set Cardinality

Subset Test

$ comm -23 <(sort subset | uniq) <(sort set | uniq) | head -1
# outputs something if subset is not a subset of set
# does not putput anything if subset is a subset of set
$ awk 'NR==FNR { a[$0]; next } { if !($0 in a) exit 1 }' set subset
# returns 0 if subset is a subset of set
# returns 1 if subset is not a subset of set